Construction
Case Study
The tax of low-level work on labour workforce
The client runs infrastructure and construction across multiple sites.
The back office moved on paper, and every document passed through a person: purchase bills, goods-received notes, admin and utility bills, sales invoices, and material-return notes. The volume is measured at about 3,565 documents a month across five document types, each taking between 10 and 45 minutes of manual handling. Put the volume and the handling time together and the back office was carrying the equivalent of four to six full-time people doing nothing but reading documents and keying them in.
The sector tax made it worse. Construction finance runs on long cycles and manual matching, and the industry's own benchmarks put the fully loaded cost of processing a single invoice by hand at $12 to $22, with construction at the upper end because of approval depth and supplier variety (APQC and Ardent Partners industry data).
THE AGENTIC SOLUTION · PERCEIVE → DECIDE → ACT
The FosterX solution: Five FosterX Agents, one per document type, across both ledgers.
Two ledgers, money going out (accounts payable and procurement) and money coming in (accounts receivable). Each agent works the way a trained clerk does. It perceives a document, decides what to do, and acts in the system of record. When it is unsure, it asks.
Purchase Bill Agent
450-500/mo · accounts payable
Perceives a supplier invoice. Decides by running the three-way match: purchase order against goods-received note against invoice, with tax validation. Acts by posting the bill or routing an exception to a human. Kills the slowest, highest-risk task in the back office.
GRN Agent
950-1,000/mo · procurement
Perceives a goods-received note at material inward. Decides whether quantities and line items match the purchase order.
Acts by recording the receipt and updating the position. Kills the manual matching that gates every downstream payment.
Admin Bills Agent
400-450/mo · AP & admin
Perceives utility and administrative bills. Decides on coding and validity. Acts by posting them. Kills a steady drip of low-value keying that still consumed real hours.
Sale Bills Agent
1,400-1,500/mo · accounts receivable · highest volume
Perceives the trigger for a customer invoice. Decides on billing detail and tax. Acts by issuing the sales invoice. Kills the delay between work done and invoice sent, where cash gets stuck.
MRN Agent
200-280/mo · procurement
Perceives a material-return note. Decides the reverse-logistics match. Acts by recording the return. Kills a reconciliation task that otherwise falls through the cracks.
Prior to employing the agents, each document took 10 to 45 minutes. Now each takes under a minute.
The same five document streams that needed four-to-six people's worth of handling now run as five agents with a human watching the edges.
Want to See the Full Case Study?
Fill in your details below to continue reading.